Douglass
Crockwell was born in Ohio in 1904 and was known as a highly competent
and conscientious commercial illustrator. There is more known about
his other career - as an avant-garde abstract animator. He began
making films in 1931. His films include, Motion Painting
No 1(1949)
; Glen
Falls Sequence 1946 and Long Bodies (1947)
Many of the images you see above are from this very period and it is
a tribute to him that such meticulous technique was expending in two
directions often thought to be mutually antagonistic - abstraction
and figuration.

He died
in 1968 in
Glen Falls NY where he had lived much of his life. See exhibition
catalogue, film as film ACGB Hayward Gallery, London,
1979.

What
makes Douglass into Crockwell rather than Rockwell? Firstly he has
an unerring and unfailingly ingenious sense of composition. He favours
the depiction of checked materials, which hover uneasily between
flatness and the rounded. This perhaps accords with his interest
in his film work in transdimensional simulation. Sharply defined
areas of a bold red, often in stripes, and used in several areas
of different materials, lace together to make a sort of unified plane
that transcends the meaning and the space. Straps and belts act as
foils to the stripes - see above. Perhaps he saw this most ingeniously
used in Japanese woodblocks. The equal weight to form and negative
form increases the flatness of the overall impact, yet the domestic
content pulls it out into another spatial dimension.

Secondly,
he achieves many compositional innovatations that jar the sense of
ease and familiarity which should have been at the heart of his gentle
domestic scenes. Windows and doors frame figures in a deliberately
bold way. Figures in the distance are treated with the same tonalities
as their foreground equivalents, inducing a spatial unease. The frame
of the composition can radically cut off elements of the figure.
A father descends to breakfast, forever without his head. A beach
scene has an urgent hand and arm suddenly intruding from the left.

Thirdly,
the result of his sheer professionalism in inventing domestic scenes
with clear trajectories through space and interlocking built structure,
but seen in an unnerving sense of dimensional slip and tense relationship
between elements, create a sinister quality to human interaction.
Whereas Norman Rockwell slips easily into the satiric and caricatural,
letting the steam out of his depiction of the American people, Crockwell
intensifies the psychological content without the caricatural. Look
at the Welch compositions for a sotr of frozen hysteria in the face
of the product. I felt that Rockwell played Meissonier to Crockwell's
Degas. Think about it.

Rockwell
is celebrated uncritically.

Crockwell
is accepted hardly at all.

Both
were capable of ghastly sentimentality. Yet the weight of literature
attached to Rockwell ensures his work is constantly in front of the
public. It is clearly time for at least one anthology of Crockwell's
achievements and the relationship between his commercial illustration
and his exercises in avant-garde film-making.

An intriguing
aspect of Crockwell's career is the production of diagrams
for lectures given by Edward Teller, the Father of the H-Bomb. These
may indeed give some clue as to the repertoire of forms he allows
himself in the animated abstractions.